Thursday, March 29, 2007

"Having an intellectual conversation, a philosophical debate or just a serious discussion with someone else can be just as gratifying as sex, a brain fuck if you will.", an acquaintance once commented to me. An interesting term, curious in all it's conflicting imagery (We never link the brain, the seat of logic, and a mass of grey, seriously unsexy stuff with sex and the more visually stimulating members which encourage it), yet ironically apt.

True enough the gratification we get from indulging in such discourses or appreciating the beauty of artfully crafted prose is different from the spontaneous physical pleasure derived from sex but they still boil down to the same thing really. That sense of satisfaction and the warm fuzzy feeling we often attribute to happiness or just having a little too much to drink. I must confess I was slightly startled when I first heard the term, as first the word 'Fuck' conveys a certain degree of forcefulness and second, let's face it, apart from being a serious turn off, a brain is hardly fuckable. A mental image of a virile Adonis pounding away furiously at a mass of battered grey goo did little to help.

But after some brief reflection, one is able to appreciate the quirky logic behind the phrase. Being afflicted with the kind of useless inquisitiveness that drives me mad over wholly irrelevant stuff like this while not caring two hoots about why a contract is void, I stopped to ponder over how discourses could be brain fucks.

Does the conversation itself entail a multiple series of brain fucks? With each comment made and returned reply a different brainfuck made by the parties in the conversation? With the person currently speaking at that moment, metaphorically fucking? A mutual fuckfest. It seemed plausible, for a while.

But then again, it didn't ring entirely true. Do we derive that sense of gratification from every reply to the comments we make during the course of the conversation? Hardly so. I cannot imagine how a person can be remotely gratified by a negative reply to a query as to whether his counterpart had read Yeats before. Just as one would not liken the individual instances of foreplay, the prelude to consummation, to intercourse itself, one should metaphorise the entire conversation as A brain fuck in itself, with the intermittent spurts of satisfaction we feel during the course of the conversation simply a buildup towards the grand finale. For it is normally when the conversation is ending or has finally ended, that this gratification and satisfaction is most keenly felt, is it not? As is the case for sex.

Which brings us to the interesting question of what is there to stop us from adopting other organs in place of the brain to describe different sensory experiences? (I.E. eye fuck (Visual stimuli), ear fuck (aural stimuli)) Logically speaking, none. However the thought of something smashing against one's eardrums or eyeballs sounds horribly gruesome and painful. Ironically, it might better fit the terms of ear and eye sores respectively.

So it is highly unlikely we'll hear such terms anytime soon. (Though you will note, I left out the mouth, men just have this burning desire to stick their manhood into any orifice which looks remotely big enough to accommodate it.) The total lack of need for safe sex while indulging in a brain fuck is another boon. No one ever contacted STDs or died from discussing metaphysics. The same can hardly be said for the trash that is called music today.

I make no apologies for this 'positively' pornographic entry. Once again, if you're offended, you really shouldn't be online, let alone reading this. Gibbering and hooting across a lush green canopy somewhere in Kalimantan should suit you primates fine.